Word: hutu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Thirty minutes before dawn last Wednesday, Hutu members of the presidential guard kicked in the door of a church just east of Rwanda's capital city of Kigali. Instantly, they opened fire with semiautomatic weapons and tossed in grenades. Then, according to Belgian news reports, they set upon the Tutsi parishioners who were still alive with knives, bats and spears. Almost 1,200 civilians were massacred, more than half of them children...
...small Central African nations of Rwanda and Burundi, where politics is still dominated by the ancient rivalry between the predominant Hutu and minority Tutsi tribes, pure tribal enmity was behind the bloodshed. Last week's violence exploded after a plane carrying Presidents Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi, both Hutus, crashed Wednesday night on the approach to Kigali airport, killing both leaders. Witnesses reported hearing heavy weapons fire moments before the plane went down. "What happened was not an accident but an assassination," said Jean Damascene Bizimana, Rwanda's ambassador to the U.N. The two leaders were...
...Hutus, had reached a peace accord with the mainly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front last August. But Habyarimana failed to form an interim government to last until new elections could be conducted. Burundi's Ntaryamira had been elected President in January by the National Assembly after the assassination of fellow Hutu Melchior Ndadaye in a bloody coup attempt last October. With Burundi's army still under the control of the Tutsis, however, Ntaryamira had been unable to stop the rash of ethnic clashes that have killed tens of thousands and made refugees of hundreds of thousands...
...early target of the violence last week. After presidential guards surrounded the house of Prime Minister (and Tutsi) Agathe Uwilingiyimana, 10 Belgian soldiers, part of a 2,400-member U.N. peacekeeping force charged with enforcing the truce between the government and the rebels, spirited her away. But the Hutu guards pursued, disarmed the U.N. troops and shot the Prime Minister dead. Then they took the Belgians back to their barracks, tortured and killed them. Three other Tutsi ministers in the government were reportedly shot...
...church and aid organizations promoting human rights and the peace process in Rwanda also suffered. Five priests and 12 young women gathered for a retreat in a Jesuit center near the airport were massacred. All were Rwandan; most were Tutsi. The guards and regular troops of the mainly Hutu Rwandan army reportedly killed Rwandan staff members of several aid organizations while expatriates were forced to look on at gunpoint...